


requiem dies irae

by cosmicpoet



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Character Study, Despair Komaeda, Remnants of Despair (Dangan Ronpa), Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-28
Updated: 2017-12-28
Packaged: 2019-02-23 05:42:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13183551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicpoet/pseuds/cosmicpoet
Summary: A study in Komaeda, as a Remnant of Despair. How his previously hopeful self, trapped beneath, clashes with how he is now.





	requiem dies irae

Komaeda walks down the streets with his own blood dripping down his gums, and he smiles, daring to show it. It’s been a while since he’s seen any of his former classmates, but he doesn’t care; none of them compare to _her,_ even he is a poor, cheap, second-hand Enoshima - and still, he’s the best that the world has got, now she’s gone. No, not gone; he touches his bloody hand to his chest. He’s got a dull knife in his hand, scraping it across the crumbling brick of the wall to the side of him, squeezing his eyes shut at the offensive sound and sucking the blood from his lips back into his mouth.

He spits onto the ground; there’s an almost-dead body just ahead of him, and his eyes light up. Killing for the sake of killing isn’t fun - he isn’t _enjoying_ this - but hope can’t be found in the shell of a soul, and with every stab, he wishes it were he who was squirming beneath the blade.

Moments like this aren’t called _clarity_ , but they do exist in a strangely liminal place in his mind. Times like these drag up his former self, the one still repressed in his gut, like rainwater brings up all the mud and dirt from the gutters. There’s a quiet, begging voice in his mind, one that tells him to just _die,_ and it comes from a place of hope, rather than despair. Initially, this voice was quite prominent - almost a scream that demanded attention from the mechanical works of his body - but now, it raises its weak voice to no more than a whisper, and Komaeda snuffs it out.

There’s a minor fire somewhere to his left, and he walks towards it, thinking of the stolen packs of cigarettes in his pocket that he took from a shop after murdering the owner a while ago. He doesn’t call them pleasures, but it’s hard to deny that some part of him likes the way his arms are littered with pockmarked burns. 

Her face flashes through his mind as he walks. He’s afraid, _of course he is,_ because he hears her in his mind, and with each day that passes, her voice begins to replace his own. But fear, as a concept, is for people who have hope for change, and he most certainly does not, so he presses on further. 

Despite not having seen his classmates since the beginning of it all, he knows that they are handling it different to the way he is taking it on. From the whispers that he’s heard, he knows that they’re bringing despair to the world around them, murdering and betraying and everything else that Enoshima would, were she not crushed, be licking up like fresh blood and glory. Komaeda is doing something else; something more befitting of how he was before he became _like this._ He finds his own revelations, his own beautiful destruction, in finding the despair that wakes within the depths of himself. 

And it hurts, and it destroys him, and it pushes his former voice further down within him, and it kills any hope that sleeps within him, and he drinks it all in like it will never end. He bathes in the discordant despair that wraps its tendrils around his whole body; mental and physical pain working in beautiful tandem to swing him, almost from a pendulum, between extremes of humanity. He’s never loved anything more than this, the constant pain, but he has to concentrate; he can’t let himself enjoy it too much.

Because to enjoy something is a positive emotion, and positivity yields hope not far behind. It’s hard, because prior to this destruction, he’d allowed himself the occasional - _only occasional_ \- release of self-injury. But there’s the initial despair, which heralds hope only if he lets himself mull on the pain after the fact is over; if he looks longingly at healing wounds, he finds beauty in them. The solution to this, of course, is to never stop hurting himself. He cannot find hope when he is drowning in despair.

He spits again. There hasn’t been a day in the past week where he hasn’t had blood in his mouth. Sometimes, it isn’t his own. Across the street, he sees a scene - two people, one beating the other to the ground. Komaeda isn’t sure if the recipient of such a brutal destruction is still breathing, but he closes his eyes and pretends - _wishes,_ as hard as he can - that he could take their place. Not in his former self-sacrificial way, but in a completely selfish need for someone to dig their fists beneath his bones and bring them back up again, cracking his ribs in two as they do so. This thought overwhelms him with thoughts that he cannot separate into neat little boxes of how he was before, and how he is now.

Rushing into a nearby warehouse, he breathes, and finds it empty, and stops walking for perhaps the first time in three days. Only once he crumples on the floor does he realise how much his legs are aching, and how he cannot allow himself to feel anything good - because good, as he knows, brings hope, and he cannot disappoint Enoshima.

However, if he doesn’t sit for a moment, he’ll surely collapse and die, and then his mission to bring despair to the world will perish with him. He needs to do something _utterly terrible_ to himself to justify allowing himself a reprieve from his eternal punishment. Slowly, methodically, he drags his knife across the ground until it hits his foot, then he takes a deep breath and realises what he must do.

Bringing the knife up towards him, he digs it into the flesh of his ankle, making a large cut and following up from there, tracing blood up his leg and across his chest, until he pushes down once more before pulling it out. The knife is now staring him blankly in the face, slick with the reflection provided by his own blood. With mute excitement, he lays his arm on the floor and hunches his back so that he’s only inches away from his own flesh, separated from touching it only by the knife. And then he digs in; his screams of pain are his own _Requiem Dies Irae,_ echoing in the empty orchestra of an abandoned warehouse and the empty shell of a previously hopeful body.

Delirious from blood loss, he holds up his severed arm and waves at himself. Then he laughs, and laughs, and laughs, branching off into eternity wearing a mask of elation.

_When he wakes, on an island, he feels that his own body harbours something disgusting._

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this just to see if I could, because I thought it would be a little different to what I normally write. Let me know what you thought in the comments! As always, have an awesome day :D


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